1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a terminal control apparatus and a terminal control method for controlling a terminal device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Fragility of a program causes a trouble to the entire system of a terminal device. Therefore, various countermeasures against the fragility have been proposed heretofore. For example, there is a technology that an operating system of the terminal device forcibly restricts an access right to valuable information such as a file and to a hardware resource such as a network interface against the program that may have the fragility.
Moreover, the fragility of the program is also discovered and released by a vendor, specialist and user association of the program. However, it sometimes takes a time from the release of the fragility of the program to a vendor's development of a correction program which corrects the program concerned.
Accordingly, it is frequent that, together with the discovered fragility, emergency means for dealing with the fragility concerned is released. However, even if information on the fragility of the program is released, it is difficult for many users to always confirm every piece of the released information. Moreover, even if acquiring the information, in some cases, the users lack expertise and cannot deal with the fragility appropriately, and further, cannot even determine whether or not the information concerned affects terminal devices of their own, or determine a degree of severity of the information, and the like. Furthermore, it sometimes occurs that the users of the terminal devices leave the fragility as it is without introducing the correction program for the fragility to the terminal devices.
Hence, there has been proposed a technology for automatically restricting an operation of the program without making the users aware thereof and reducing a damage caused by the fragility. For example, there has been proposed a terminal device which monitors an operation state of a program A, and upon detecting an abnormal operation of the program A, forcibly shuts down the program A under abnormal operation, also normally shuts down a program B operating in conjunction with the program A, and restarts an operating system (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication 2001-229032).
However, in the terminal device which monitors the operation state of the program and forcibly shuts down the program upon detecting the abnormal operation thereof, it has sometimes occurred that the damage caused by the fragility of the program has already expanded when the abnormal operation was detected. Accordingly, even if the program is forcibly shut down after the detection of the abnormal operation, this was not an effective countermeasure against the fragility.
Moreover, the terminal device determines whether or not the operation thereof coincides with an already known abnormal operation pattern, or determines whether or not the operation thereof is out of the normal operation, thus detecting the abnormal operation. Accordingly, the above-described forcible shut down does not become the effective means against an unknown abnormal operation in some cases. Furthermore, the terminal device can do no more than shut down the program forcibly upon detecting the abnormal operation, and cannot make a flexible control, either.
In this connection, it is an object of the present invention to provide a terminal control apparatus and a terminal control method for rapidly and flexibly coping appropriately with a terminal device for which it is necessary to deal with fragility of a program.